An increasing number of companies and other enterprises are reducing their costs by migrating portions of their information technology infrastructure to cloud service providers. For example, virtual data centers and other types of systems comprising distributed virtual infrastructure are coming into widespread use. Commercially available virtualization software such as VMware® vSphere™ may be used by cloud service providers to build a variety of different types of virtual infrastructure, including private and public cloud computing and storage systems, which may be distributed across hundreds of interconnected computers, storage devices and other physical machines.
In cloud-based information processing system arrangements of the type described above, enterprises in effect become tenants of the cloud service providers. Thus, a given tenant may share hardware or software resources or other products with other tenants. However, not all products that are sold into the cloud service provider space are configured to support such multi-tenancy.
This lack of multi-tenancy support creates difficulties for the cloud service provider, in that the provider may have to avoid usage of certain products not configured for multi-tenancy, or face an increase in its product costs by adding separate instances of such products for each tenant.
It is also problematic for the product manufacturer, in that the manufacturer may have difficulty selling products that are not configured for multi-tenancy, or may face increased development costs to adapt each of its products to support multi-tenancy. More particularly, making significant changes to the internal working of products to support multi-tenancy requires a substantial skills and resource commitment on behalf of the product manufacturer. Furthermore, making changes natively within each product poses a time-to-market challenge, delaying the ability of the product manufacturer to compete in cloud service marketplaces where multi-tenancy is an important feature.